Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  On Thursday the 7th, I made one last visit to 31 Connollystrasse. There were notices on the bulletin board about an upcoming Rosh Hashanah party, a few personal messages. My sense of outrage that I’d felt for the last two days had turned into a heavy, deadening sadness. I was glad I was getting out of there. I had already written a signoff column for the Post. I didn’t know how they’d take it.

  Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Post five years later, probably would have fired me. But the paper in those days was the only liberal daily in the city. My editor told me that I had caught the mood of the paper’s readership. Everyone had been numbed by what happened. Watch the rest of the games on TV, write a few overview pieces if I felt like it, then go back on the Jets beat. Oh yes, we’ve put you in for a Pulitzer. I didn’t win it, but I was told that I’d been a finalist, whatever that meant.

  America closed out the competition as the world’s whiners. Stan Wright had filed an appeal, concerning the missed heats of the 100. The bus had been caught in traffic, he said. The appeals board laughed at him. Vince Matthews won the gold medal in the 400, and Wayne Collett took the silver, and on the victory stand, they staged some half-assed demonstration involving chatting with each other and shuffling their feet during the anthem. It was a poor imitation of the black gloves of Mexico City, and I guessed that it was Matthews’ way of getting back at Bowerman as much as anyone for what he had put him through before the games started. Mount Olympus took it big, however, and both of them were barred for life.

  Jim Ryun, America’s star miler, panicked and tried to cut through traffic during his heat of the 1,500 and knocked himself out of the race. An American appeal, naturally. Another denial. Everyone’s fault but ours. And, of course, America’s first ever basketball loss, to Russia, after the Soviets had been given three chances to inbounds the pass leading to their winning basket, drew the loudest howls of all. So bitter was our reaction that to this day the team never has claimed its silver medal.

  Only TV’s Bill Russell pointed out that we were playing outdated, 1940-style basketball, and the reason for it was Hank Iba. Iba hadn’t coached for almost a decade, but he had officially been appointed the U.S. coach for the last three Olympics. We never should have been that close to the Russians in the first place. We shot a miserable 19-for-57, but even so, when we pressed their backcourt, they came apart. But this was late in the game. When we freelanced and drove to the bucket, they couldn’t keep up and they fouled us. But pressure was not Iba’s style. He had taken a bunch of racehorses and put them in front of a wagon, but he was dearly beloved by our Olympic Committee.

  Mark Spitz, the swimmer with his seven gold medals, was the closest thing America had to an Olympic superstar, but there was no joy in this young man, only public hostility and a mercenary tinge that turned off the newsmen attending his monosyllabic press conferences. David Wolper, the movie man, stood behind him at his last one, reminding him not to give away anything quotable, not when it could be profitably merchandized later on.

  ABC’s Chris Schenkel put a perfect ending on this sorry mess of an Olympic Games during the last major event, the marathon. The camera followed Frank Shorter through the Bavarian countryside, and Schenkel, his words as empty as his brain, intoned, “Bavaria, whose motto always has been live and let live. And that could well be the motto for this Olympics.” Maybe no one had told him what had happened.

  I went back to covering the Jets with a sense of relief. Only one of the players came over to me and spoke with understanding about what had gone on over in Munich and my desire to abandon my coverage. John Elliott, a defensive tackle from the University of Texas.

  “I know just what you went through and why you left,” he said. “I would have done the same thing.”

  It would be simplistic to say that set everything right in the world of sports, but it helped. It had come from an unexpected source. Maybe others had shared his feelings. Would I come back and cover another Olympics, Montreal in ’76, Moscow in ’80? Probably, once I had dried out from this one. I mean, I was a professional. I was getting paid.

  Moscow 1980

  When I left the New York Post and came to Sports Illustrated in August 1979, part of the deal was that the only event I would cover, aside from pro football, would be the Olympic Games. “So you can keep your streak intact,” I was told.

  So it was with some misgiving, but a sense of sticking to the bargain, that SI pulled me out of the NFL training camps and onto a Swissair flight to Moscow in 1980. What presented itself over the next three weeks was a writer’s workshop of intrigue, politics, double-dealing, protest, all the elements of what I had come to expect from this great, quadrennial gathering of sporting nations and what I had written to the best of my ability and understanding in the four previous Olympics I had covered. OK, maybe not so much in Tokyo, which really was a “fun” Olympics, compared to what came afterward.

  The first of three pieces I filed from Moscow, all with considerable fervor, involved three refuseniks who were undergoing a hunger strike to try to influence participating nations to put pressure on the Soviet government to ease restrictions on people trying to leave … just three young guys starving themselves on the floor of their apartment. The next piece was an in-depth look at one young man who had been trying to get out of Russia for more than five years. I thought the idea that we had to communicate by writing on one of those kid’s erasable slates because everything in his apartment was bugged was an interesting touch. The third piece was about how the city had cleared out all the undesirables: drunks, troublemakers, Jews who had been particularly outspoken, etc., to provide the city with a cosmetic look for the Olympic period. “For their own safety,” was the official version.

  All were bounced back to me with the message, “Too political.” The third one carried further instructions to cover Russia’s opening basketball game against Czechoslovakia, with the notation, “Try to mention Misha Bear if you can … Gil loves Misha Bear,” Gil referring to managing editor Gil Rogin and Misha referring to Russia’s Hallmark-cute logo to prove to the world what a sweet country it was that America and 64 other nations had chosen to boycott, imagine! The boycott, of course, took place because Russia had invaded Afghanistan.

  SI, I was told, was downplaying any political angle during the games themselves, make that non-playing it, because the magazine had been afforded pretty good access to Russian athletes, and it was not in its best interest to jeopardize that relationship.

  Well, this was a new one. If you live long enough, I guess you’ll experience all sorts of variations on the art of existence. The stories I had rounded up involved personal forays, following up angles, some of which had been supplied by my trip to Moscow’s synagogue on Arkhipova Street, within walking distance of our hotel, the Rossiya. Before I left for Moscow, Time Magazine’s bureau chief told me to make the synagogue my first stop.

  “That’s where you’ll find out what’s going on,” he said. So I did … and I did.

  It was a lively Saturday afternoon scene, the action outside the building … Jews, non-Jews, tourists, KGB operatives, everyone talking things over, swapping rumors and information, “hondeling,” is the Yiddish word for it. At one point a young man in a neat business suit approached me and said, “They will not let me leave this country … would you help me and take some papers to someone in the United States for me?”

  Behind him, a few people were laughing and signaling to me with a thumbs down motion and mouthing the initials “KGB.” But I really didn’t need much help. He looked about as Jewish as Rosie O’Grady’s father. I said, “Since I’m a guest in this country, I don’t think it would be right to violate its laws.” He snorted and moved on to someone else.

  Walking back to the hotel after that opening session, I was followed to the very door itself by two similarly looking gentlemen whom I assume occupied the same role. Next day at the synagogue I asked a woman about it.

&nbs
p; “Oh yes, they were KGB,” she said. “They probably followed you because they had nothing better to do. They wanted to see if there was any ‘rabbit’ in you.”

  I asked her why everyone always was outside the synagogue and nobody ever seemed to go in it.

  “See for yourself,” she said.

  So next day I did. It was large, majestic, actually. And totally deserted, except for two people, a youngster I assumed was a student, an acolyte of some kind, and a man who was perhaps in his 30s and introduced himself as the rabbi. Stocky, genial, wearing a little Van Dyke beard and a porkpie hat, he seemed quite ready to answer all questions. No, there was no prohibition on Jews leaving the country, as far as he knew. How about the refuseniks? “Troublemakers,” he said. No, there was no truth to the rumor that troublemakers had been cleared out. At that point I thanked him and took my leave.

  On the way out, the youngster, the student, who had listened to our conversation with his head bowed, murmured, “I’m sorry,” and didn’t look up.

  I was getting stuff on my own, away from the official SI entourage, and that I learned was frowned upon. You were expected to be part of the team. Motion was severely limited. You traveled in a pack. “Are we ready to go now? Who, Jill? Oh, she forgot to make her phone call? How about Chris? Bathroom again, huh? Poor guy. Where’s Jen? Yeah, I know, she said she’d be ready … we’ll give her another 20 minutes, and that’s it.” Maddening, frustrating, impossible if you wanted to get something done. But right there was the weakness of my argument. There was nothing I really had to get done in that first week of rejected stories unless you call Russia-Czechoslovakia basketball something. And that story never ran, as well it shouldn’t have … maybe because I didn’t give Misha Bear his due.

  Early in the games, I realized that there was a story to be written that nobody had been chasing, The Olympics Within the Olympics, Russia vs. East Germany. The fans gave me the first indication. The East Germans sat in a block, low on the backstretch of the massive Lenin Stadium, mostly businessmen and politicians and their families, off on a short holiday. They cheered their own athletes and were quick to whistle, the European equivalent of booing, when something went wrong but equally loud were the cheers for an athlete from another country who showed well against a Soviet competitor, cutting down the odds that Russia would add to its massive gold medal total. When a Russian athlete did well, the East German fans responded with silence.

  The Russian fans were looser, less organized, Muscovites mainly, the privileged few who were lucky enough to be awarded tickets. They were a satisfied group; their athletes won two out of every five medals awarded in the entire games, thanks to the 65-nation boycott that reduced the competition to a kind of intramural tournament among Iron Curtain countries. They became even blasé about their triumphs except when the loser happened to be an East German. When Russia’s Lyudmila Kondratyeva, for instance, beat East Germany’s world record holder, Marlie Gohr, in the 100, a mighty roar rocked the stadium.

  “Molodyets!” They yelled. “Molodyets!” Literally translated: “Good little boy.” Actually, “Attaboy!”

  I hunted down my best source on the Russian squad, Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, the famous Ter-O, whose long jump battles with Ralph Boston lit up the U.S. indoor track circuit for so many years, who liked the meets in New York so he’d go down to the Village afterward and party with the Americans and listen to some jazz. A good guy, clever, fluent in English and in 1980 one of the Soviet coaches.

  “Do you know that the plaza of the Olympic Village is filled with observers?” he said. “Come, let’s take a walk.”

  We walked out of the plaza area toward an open field bordering the practice track, away from all metal. “Never talk to someone here near anything metallic,” he said.

  “It’s bugged? All of it’s bugged? Everything?” I said, slow to catch on. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “We can talk, but to be seen talking to GDR (German Democratic Republic) athletes or coaches is not a good thing,” he said. “Yes, of course, they are our main rivals here. It’s not so much one nation against another, it’s the rivalry between athletic systems. The athletes know that if they talk to GDR athletes, they are observed, and that is not good. But even so, you are always thinking, Is this man talking to me because he is friendly, or does he want to know something? About training methods, about medical things. It is much safer just to avoid them, especially here, where we want to beat each other so badly.”

  I called the magazine. Its opening Olympic story had mentioned the pleasant face Moscow had adopted for its Olympics. I was told to write what I had, and then they’d see. I tried to sell it … not mentioning Ter-O’s name, of course, but using his quotes and describing the scene, the avoidance of metal, the presence of observers. I felt that I needed one or two more people to quote and then I was in. The piece was never used.

  In Montreal I had filed 49 pieces for the Post; every one printed. In Moscow my total would be two, although at this point it was zero. I tried to shake the depression that was gripping me like some slow-moving quicksand. Once I had talked to an AP guy who was stationed in Bucharest and I asked him what it was like.

  “Don’t ever spend any time there if you have the least little bit of a suicide tendency,” he told me. I was beginning to feel that way about Moscow. The actual physical nature of the city contributed heavily to this feeling. The guidebooks described Moscow as dictated by “Stalinist architecture,” meaning, if the book was being euphemistic, a reliance on Medieval forms. To me it meant something different, though. It meant something heavy and unyielding and gray, a lurking monster, a massive figure like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft science fiction fantasy. It was effective, it could crush your spirit. If it had been deliberately done, then the Soviet system never got enough credit for cleverly exploiting the powers of psychology. Or maybe they just liked size.

  Take the Rossiya, our official press hotel … “The evil, Hideous Hotel Rossiya,” the journalist and photographer, Declan McCullagh, had written. “Stalinist in architecture and demeanor. Try to stay anywhere else.” At one time its 3,200 rooms made it the largest hotel in the world. One afternoon I decided to measure its circumference by stepping it off. I counted 1,075 steps, each one stretched to at least a yard. Three quarters of a mile around the Rossiya, hugging as close to the building as I could. Maybe that was a record, too. Passes, along with room keys, were always required. You couldn’t even have a drink in the bar without a pass. In other words, a normal young Muscovite, who wasn’t staying there, was prohibited from taking his girl for a drink at the Rossiya, such as a New Yorker could at the Plaza, for instance. I hadn’t realized the restrictions Moscow put on its citizens. I mean, the country supposedly conceived in socialism was the most elitist I’d ever seen.

  The size of things, my God, the size. Was this also part of a psychological master plan to show individuals how insignificant they were? Well, it worked on me. Buildings were massive, monuments, tombs, apartment complexes. There were huge, 14-lane highways that ran through the city with practically no traffic on them. Standing at the bottom of one of the escalators in a subway station, you seemed to be peering upward from a very deep mine. Never have I seen manmade caverns to match them. To enter the Olympic Village, you showed your press credential at a checkpoint. You got a pass. Then you took your pass half a mile away to the entrance to the village. Why couldn’t it all have been in the same area? I could only guess that it represented a love of space, size, open plains, vast steppes, mournful balalaika music. When the Russians moved into Afghanistan, they didn’t do it quietly or deftly; they rolled in with their tanks and armor as if it were World War III. And yes, it all started getting to me, the crushing weight of a city, a system, Sports Illustrated.

  I started watching the early morning soaps on Russian TV. One in particular got my attention. It involved a weightlifter, a good-looking, dark haired guy with glasses,
who was having trouble with his wife, and somehow that affected him in competition. My Russian wasn’t good enough to keep me on top of the plot, but I had a general idea of what was going on. I began to really look forward to it each morning.

  I was turning into a toad. I had to break out of it, show some spirit, do something! We had been told to watch ourselves, that the babushka ladies that manned the halls were KGB spies, that every hotel room would be bugged. Oh yeah? Well, bug this! I called the room of Kenny Moore, a former world class long distance runner who was doing our track coverage. He was kind of a nervous guy, a typically skittery marathoner.

  “Herr Moore?” I said in my best Weber and Fields German accent. “This is Doktor Paulus Schrieber of the GDR team. Two of our runners want to defect to the vest, and I was told you could help arrange this.” He began stammering … “w-w-w-ell I d-d-don’t know …” and I figured I’d better cut it off before the poor guy had a heart attack. If he’d have been thinking clearly, he’d have figured out that the name was Paul the Writer, but I guess he had enough on his mind, with everything being bugged and both of us on our way to Lubyanka Prison or a mental hospital or worse.

  Finally I connected on a story … Americans who were competing under different banners, the basketball player with the obscure Italian grandfather, the flyweight boxer who’d been born in Puerto Rico, etc. And there was Rocky Crosswhite from Bethesda, Md., a former Davidson reserve center who had become Mr. Basketball. In Australia. He had married an Australian girl and gotten Australian citizenship, and this was his third Olympics for the Aussies. The government had left the decision whether or not to compete up to the athletes, and the team had voted 14-1 to play. His was the one negative vote, but as captain, he felt it was his duty to stick with his teammates.